Do hands-free laws make our roads safer?

Metro.us

Massachusetts is considering a hands-free cellphone law for drivers, but will it really stop people from driving while distracted?

Texting while driving is already against the law in Massachusetts, but a proposed bill that was recently approved by the state Senate is looking to take things further by requiring completely hands-free driving.

The Senate’s law would allow for bluetooth or other hands-free calls, but would ban social media use and bar drivers from manually typing addresses into their GPS apps (though they can still use the apps).

But is a hands-free law enough to make the roads safer? Hari Balakrishnan is an MIT professor and the co-founder of Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), which built Drivewell, a program that offers rewards and incentives to make people better drivers. That technology was used in the Boston’s Safest Driver app the city debuted last year. He said the new bill is a good start, but alone, it may not be enough.

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About CMT

Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) makes the world’s roads safer using mobile sensing and IoT, machine learning, and behavioral science. Since its first product launch in 2012, which helped establish the new category of mobile usage-based insurance, CMT has grown to become the world’s leading mobile telematics and analytics company.